IN MEMORIAM

Robert Burr Livingston

Professor Emeritus of Neuro Science

UC San Diego

1918 – 2002

Robert Burr Livingston, the founding chairman of the first Department of Neurosciences in the world, we believe, at the University of California in San Diego and among the first faculty appointed to the UCSD School of Medicine, died in San Diego on April 26, 2002 following a pulmonary embolism.

 

Born in Boston on October 9, 1918, he attended high school in Portland, Oregon. His A.B. (1940) and M.D. (1944) degrees were from Stanford University. He interned at the Stanford University Hospital before serving (1944-46) as a Navy medical officer attached to the Marines in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. During the Okinawa campaign he received the Bronze Star as a battlefield surgeon. He told of bombs dropping while he operated. For a period he was a medical officer assigned to China, where he studied and learned some conversational Mandarin and made lifelong friends with the future head of the Academia Sinica Brain Research Institute, H.T. Chang. Bob's father and brother were neurosurgeons: his father, William K., known for his research and book on pain, was the longtime chairman of surgery at the University of Oregon, in Portland; Bob’s brother, Kenneth E., had a long career in the University of Toronto.

 

His first academic appointment (1946-48) was as Instructor, then Assistant Professor, at Stanford, teaching pathology. The second (1948-52) was at the Yale Medical School, Department of Physiology, where he worked under the ardent historian John Fulton, and acted as the Director of its Aeromedical Research Unit. He then went to the new School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles and moved from Assistant Professor to Professor of Anatomy and Physiology (1952-56). He accepted an appointment (1956-65) at NIH in Bethesda, MD, where he became the Scientific Director of both the Mental Health Institute and the Neurological Diseases and Blindness Institute as well as the Director of his own research unit, the Laboratory of Neurobiology. During part of this time he served under Detlev Bronk on the staff of the National Academy of Science. His final appointment, Professor of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego from 1965-1989, was as founding Chairman of the Department of that name. This post was largely self-made and was inspired, as was the Department’s name, by Bob’s membership.

 

Since the early 1960s a unique experiment in scientific communication started at M.I.T. by its then chairman of Biology, biophysicist Francis O. Schmitt. Schmitt called it “The Neurosciences Research Program”, promulgating a new term which was later picked up by a National Academy committee that set into motion a new Society for Neuroscience. Bob saw the chance in a new medical school, without departments defending long-held space and positions, to be particularly attractive because of the school’s radical plan to eschew traditional departments of anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry. He proposed – and the school bought the idea – that the neuro-components of these traditional disciplines be brought together under the new heading. He recruited and was able to house them in space generously provided by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, partly because he had been ship’s physician many years before on an historic mid-Pacific expedition and had many friends among the key oceanographers, including Roger Revelle, principal architect of the new campus, “UCSD”. Bob retired in 1989 and experienced a decade or more of a variety of Alzheimer’s disease that preserved to the end his gentle and generous facets.

 

Bob’s was a complex and multi-compartmented personality that led him through a series of phases, driven by convictions and goals. He was a visionary who had to undertake pioneering projects that in their nature would not be guaranteed approval by all his friends. First, chronologically, was his very deliberately chosen vocation for research. Only later did he choose to concentrate on the brain and its relation to behavior. The first themes were dictated by his positions. When he was a resident at the Stanford hospital he believed he was the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of penicillin against syphilis spirochetes: he counted the drop in their number sampled intermittently from an open chancre – the first time the drug was ever given to a patient, according to his own account. Papers on high-altitude physiology came from his period as head of the aeromedical unit at Yale. Brain mapping became a major theme with long range consequences for his future goals inspired by the seminal experience in Zurich of working as a visitor under Konrad Akert on electron microscopy of synapses in different states. From his UCLA period came an appreciation of the prevalence and importance of central control of sense organs and modulation of sensory input to the brain by higher centers acting at several stages of the influx. He left Bethesda to take the job at UCSD, eager to use new methods to teach medical students in a new medical school, with a faculty representing neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuropharmacology, neurobehavior and clinical neurology, in short, neuroscience. When he failed to get neuropathology and neurosurgery under his umbrella before they became parts of the departments of pathology and surgery, it was a major disappointment.

 

He spent years of effort and a fair amount of money in developing, improving and using the technique of cutting sections from paraffin-embedded or frozen whole brains – human, anthropoid, rat, and others – then, after each section, photographing the cut face and displaying the result as a cine succession of two- dimensional views, which allowed the mental reconstruction of a 3-D journey through the structures in the brain. These, together with animated films made by Hollywood professionals, made prize-winning color films of neural structures and the activity of nerve cells. The express aim was to add computer readout that would quantify volumes for comparison between individuals and species. Though these refinements did not materialize in Livingston’s time, his vision seeded the now very active endeavors of others using related methods to build computerized atlases of the brain through the Human Brain Project and within these anatomical frameworks integrating physiological and biochemical information. This large-scale synthesis of information about the brain, from the underlying genomics to behavior, was what Bob had in mind when he began to bring computing to bear on the problem of understanding the nervous system.

 

To help advance the new field of quantitative brain-mapping, he organized a conference of its leading practitioners and theorists held at Texas A and M University in 1985. Interest in brain development combined with a strong humanitarian motivation to propel Bob into the controversial field of dependence of brain development in human infants upon unknown, minor components of the diet. He became convinced from the literature that inadequate nutrition puts a substantial fraction of children at risk for only partly reversible stunting of brain development and represents a readily preventable major sin of so rich a society as ours. With the guidance of a well-established nutritionist at Berkeley, he led a large team of field workers in San Diego to estimate the number of at risk babies in this community and found it was large. His evidence and that of parallel studies elsewhere failed to convince enough of the relevant granting agencies and unfortunately this project also withered. Bob pioneered many aspects of the way we now teach basic neurology, spending untold hours planning, designing, and assembling instrumented study carrels for self-paced learning of unitized topics in basic neurology, with self-administered quizzes and progression. He thus incidentally created a major facility at UCSD: the Office of Learning Resources, staffed for multimedia expertise applied to medical teaching, with illustrators, plastic embedment, cine and TV recording from models to clinical demonstrations, building up a library of useful material available to individuals and exportable. In the end, nothing was finished in the form he had planned as exportable units for the whole course, with illustrations in many media.

 

In the 1970s Bob joined Theodore Bullock in teaching the Biology Department’s course in Introductory Neurobiology until that department had recruited several outstanding neurobiologists who took on the sequence of introductory, advanced and laboratory courses. But he could not stop teaching. For the Extension Division Bob created a new course sometimes called Human Nature which was part history of science, part primate evolution, and part the physiological basis of perception, motor control and behavioral biology. This evening class continued for a number of years with a sizeable number of enthusiastic older and younger students. Bob loved to step back and take the larger view, to add historical perspective and to emphasize humanistic relevance. He liked to underline the evidence of human diversity – in anatomy, physiology, perception (e.g., distinguishing “expanders” who see classical optical illusions from “contractors”, who do not) and in degree and quality of spontaneity and creativity. He was strong on motivating students and then giving them maximum freedom to learn when and what they wished – and was one of the instigators of the UCSD system of medical student research and theses. He wrote the equivalent of a textbook on neurophysiology by doing solo all the chapters on the nervous system for John West’s edition of Best & Taylor’s classical textbook of physiology. He also did a small paperback book covering the physiology of sensory reception of all the modalities. One of his major contributions to the UCSD neurosciences graduate and PhD program was largely to support the inclusion of neuroscience in other departments, rather than to try to keep it in his. This pioneering distributed interdisciplinary model of training in brain research has been copied by nearly all other neurosciences graduate training programs. Because of the format, quality of the program and the success of the students, the program Bob instigated has been regarded as outstanding for quite some time.

 

Teaching was not enough. Bob was an idealistic activist and wrote untold letters on behalf of causes such as the safe location of radioactive waste sites, disarmament, repressed people and organizations such as the Physicians for Social Responsibility, of which he became the president of the San Diego chapter. He was also active in other organizations for relief and for peace.

 

He greatly admired the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and became an official tutor and advisor to him, on matters of science and biology, making a number of trips to his residence in India.

 

Among his other pleasures were ocean sailing and climbing/hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains which he did for years, almost annually with an old friend, Robert MacNamara, despite their quite different political views.

 

An avid bibliophile, Bob years ago left an assortment of his old books as a special collection in the UCSD Library. Twelve linear feet of his correspondence and other papers, many of potential interest to historians, are archived in the UCSD Library.

  

 

Mark H. Ellisman

Robert Galambos

Theodore H. Bullock, Chair